Criss Cross

Chapter 31

The dog started barking around one that morning, sharp, insistent, in that same irritating, sawing pattern.

That did it. I couldn’t take another sleepless night, so I got up, got dressed, and went out to find the dog.

But I couldn’t find the dog.

When I stepped out on the front porch, the barking sounded like it was coming from the back of the house. But when I walked around to the alley, I could have sworn I heard the dog barking to the south.

I went south, but the sound seemed to be moving away. All of a sudden, it stopped. Then it started again, and I had the animal pinpointed.

He was on the back porch of a small, unlit house a little more than a block and a half away, across the street from the Caseys, old friends of my grandmother. I could see the shape of him up there, barking, a small dog for the size of its voice, a terrier of some kind.

I was just about to go to the front and knock when a door opened to the rear porch, and the dog vanished inside.

I stood there waiting for ten or fifteen minutes to make sure the dog was not going to reappear, then I went home. As I climbed the stairs, I told myself to get some sleep.

But at the bedroom door, I realized I was wide awake. I decided to go down to the kitchen, maybe make one of those magnesium drinks that are supposed to help you sleep by working on your adrenal glands or some such nonsense.

Instead, I found myself climbing to the third floor and thinking about how perceptive Ali had been to theorize that M sometimes acted like a copycat. Would I have come up with that at his age?

I doubted it. At ten years old, I was all about sports and trying to fit in at school after Nana Mama brought me up to Washington, DC, following the death of my mother. No, there had been too much turbulence in my life at that age for me to have reasoned like Ali did.

I flipped on the light in my attic office and sat at the desk. Bree was right. It wasn’t good for a boy of ten to be fixated on dark criminal behavior.

And yet, there was a part of me that wanted to brag about him.

Here Ali was, only ten, and on his own he’d figured out something that had completely eluded the reporters who were writing about M and Diane Jenkins. They hadn’t seen the connection between her kidnapping and Arlene Duffy’s death years before or between the decapitated head and the Meat Man. But Ali had seen it.

How did that happen? Where was the insight?

After a few moments of pondering, I grew concerned, thinking about the possibility of Ali digging further and deeper, especially into the case of Mikey Edgerton.

Who knew what he’d find if he was given the chance?

My attention swung to another corner of my office and other stacks of boxes containing my old investigative files. Where were they, the Edgerton files?

I wasn’t sure, and for some reason that made me a little flustered. I got up from behind the desk and went over to look. They weren’t where I expected them to be, with Kissy’s old files, and I started to panic.

What if Ali came up here and looked around in the files? What if he took them to his room and is studying them? How perceptive can a ten-year-old be?

But then I lifted up an old army blanket and found them, four boxes, each marked m.e.

Part of me wanted to lower the army blanket back over the Mikey Edgerton files and leave them alone, just as I had for years. But the idea of Ali finding the files forced me to put the blanket aside and grab the boxes.

When they were restacked next to my desk, I considered what to do with them. Why did I even still have them? I should have burned them all years ago, turned the secrets in those files to smoke and ash.

But I had not.

John Sampson had done that with his. He told me so two months after Edgerton’s conviction, said he took them to a friend’s cabin in the Poconos and fed the files one by one into a roaring fire. Put it all behind him.

Try as I might, I couldn’t do it, although I couldn’t have said exactly why.

Something had stopped me from destroying the evidence of guilt as well as the evidence of innocence in those boxes. It wasn’t shame or contrition on my part, because I felt none whatsoever when it came to Mikey Edgerton.

So what was it?

I stared at the boxes and told myself to go back to sleep. But deep inside, another voice was telling me there might be answers in the boxes, clues that could lead me to M.

Or doom me.

Once I’d thought that, there was no pushing ahead. I threw the blanket over the boxes and left.